Too Important to Smile Back: The 'Boss Effect'

By

Robert Lee Hotz

Updated Oct. 16, 2012 1:14 p.m. ET

Status and authority shape our facial expressions, turning even a simple smile into a power play, new research suggests.

Probing the power smile, brain researchers are discovering how status and authority shape our facial expressions. New research made public Sunday suggests the human face also is a mirror of office hierarchies. Lee Hotz has details on Lunch Break. Photo: Getty Images.

New experiments, made public this week at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in New Orleans, credited lightning-quick social reflexes, ingrained in neural circuits, for determining when we smile.

Generally, we reflexively share or conceal a smile based on rank, power and status, said researchers who analyzed the involuntary facial responses involved in returning or suppressing a smile.

ENLARGE

People reflexively share or conceal smiles based on power and status, researchers say.
Getty Images

It is the newest insight into what scientists studying culture and the brain call the "boss effect," in which the social pressure of status and power affects our neurobiology.

"It shapes your neural architecture," said cognitive neuroscientist Sook-Lei Liew at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, who has studied the phenomenon but wasn't involved in the research presented this week.

The culture of office politics can alter our perceptions of faces and expressions in subtle ways. Normally, we recognize our own face first in a group of photographs, for instance. Under some circumstances, though, it is the picture of our boss that we respond to first, in an involuntary reaction that overrules our usual social reflexes.

This "boss effect" can vary by national culture. Chinese workers reacted fastest to a picture of their direct supervisor—but only if the boss had the power to give them a negative job evaluation, according to a study last year by Dr. Liew and colleagues at the University of Southern California and Peking University.

By contrast, U.S. test subjects reacted most quickly to a supervisor whom they perceived as more socially influential.

In the test results being presented at the neuroscience meeting this week, researchers at the University of California in San Diego documented how a smile can embody workplace authority.

Using a technique called facial electromyography, UCSD cognitive neuroscientist Evan Carr tested the reactions among 55 men and women students who were divided into categories of those who felt personally more powerful and those who felt less.

They were shown videos of people they were told held a high-ranking position, like a physician, or a low-ranking job, like a fast-food restaurant worker.

He recorded the involuntary movements of muscles involved in smiling as they watched the videos, millisecond by millisecond.

Whether or not someone unconsciously mimics the facial expressions of another—such as by returning a smile—appeared to depend, in part, on how powerful the mimic feels, and the status of the person they are "mirroring," he found.

The researchers found that when people felt they were powerful themselves, they would rarely return a high-ranking person's smile, automatically suppressing the tendency to mimic an engaging grin, the researchers found.

"You might be feeling more competitive," Mr. Carr said.

Those who felt more powerless, however, automatically mimicked everyone else's smile, regardless of rank.

"Your feelings about power and status seem to dictate how much you are willing to return a smile to another person," Mr. Carr said. "We are really able to act as a human chameleon and react to these social situations without really being aware of doing it."

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